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A concerned group of neighbors met recently about transients in their neighborhood. Their concerns were real; primarily safety and health issues. But people were puzzled when subsequently urged to speak up for "community benefits" requirements for developers. What's the connection, one of them wondered.

Our current crop of politicians and developers who fund them love this disconnection. They need to keep the perplexing dilemma of how to address people camping in local parks and open spaces as far away as possible from story of Berkeley's systematic destruction of single room occupancy hotels, boarding houses, and low income housing, once plentiful in Berkeley, where low-income travelers used to be able to find short-term shelter. 

Developers' preference for building dense high-end, luxury housing is obvious; the more you can charge and the more units you can build, the more money you make. The more you convince planners that forcing people to live six to a "quad" in tight spaces, the more profit you can generate for yourself and the more sensible the money you threw into a politician's campaign begins to look. 

But politicians, while enjoying the cozy and lucrative relationship they achieve with wealthy developers for voting for such proposals, have a community beyond that group to please, at least until the day that elections are entirely bought. 

The concerned group of neighbors put it together pretty quickly. Their representative on the council did not connect the dots between the city's blind dedication to luxury housing, which produces a comically small handful of "affordable" apartments for the $80,000 a year set, and the community costs of leaving people who need housing the most out on the street. 

The good news is that people are making the connection. Conservative neighborhood groups are making the connection. The large "Luxury Apartments" signs, a point of pride for a developer group, send a different message to those who have connected the dots and know what the signs really mean; our current politicians and planners planned this housing emergency, and now need to take emergency measures to get whole families off the streets.